social media

Earlier today, however, a mechanical engineer named Claudio Ibarra commented on a Google+ thread that he thought that the animated GIF was a “waste.”

Is that true? The White House has had a communications staff for a long time. What’s wasted time — and what isn’t?

Prior to the Internet, the White House devoted resources to television broadcasts from the Oval Office or fireside chats on the radio. Devoting resources to communicating with the people isn’t new. Well, every federal agency has a public information officer. Some have more staff In this case, we’re talking about a few 20-something staffers — a 30-something, in the case of Macon Phillips — extending their use of communication tools from press releases to blogging and social media.

A majority of the American people — and a billion people around the world — is now on Facebook. They’re here on Google Plus, Twitter, Pinterest and Github. They’re massively online in many other places. Does it make sense to share details of policies there? To upload speeches to YouTube? To publish the federal budget or government data? To devote resources to directly communicating with everyone interested, as opposed to the media?

If you answered “yes” to any of that, then going on Tumblr makes more sense. There’s a different, younger demographic there that may not be found on Facebook, read newspapers or visit the White House blog. If they’re able to reach those young people and engage them, they may become more politically involved. That’s one reason that using social media makes obvious sense, in terms of resource allocation, for communications staff.

For policy staff, like national security, environmental, health or science advisors, there is more of a tradeoff. If citizen engagement around rulemaking, legislation and regulation makes sense for a given mission, then public-facing social media use will increasingly be part of their work. If not, then there’s a legitimate case to be made that spending time there while they’re working would be wasting resources.

Could the time spent making an animated GIF be devoted elsewhere, explaining the tax code in plain English, summarizing complicated laws or engaging the public about proposed regulations?

The answer is clearly yes. The sticky wicket there is that few citizens are reading reams of regulations or participating in the rulemaking that leads to them. If you were trying to engage 18-25 year olds, would you point them to the Federal Register? Send them a PDF of the US Code or tax code? How about Regulations.gov? (There’s an API there now, BTW, if anyone reading this wants to pull proposed notices of rulemaking or regulations out and make them more interesting to the public.) Would you send them to HHS.gov to read the rules from the PPACA, AKA “Obamacare?”

Young people don’t generally watch the evening news. They’re not reading newspapers in the same numbers as the previous generation. They’re hanging out on their phones and sharing transitory, ephemeral media in rapidly expanding universe of “dark social” options. Should government ignore that new context for communication and expect young people to go find government websites or visit the library? Or go try to engage them where they are?

Postscript: Michelle Chronister, a senior content manager at the General Services Administration, librarian and Tumblr user, thought I was taking a dig at libraries in that last paragraph and pointed out that young people still use them in high numbers:

That was definitely not my intention. Rather, that it was important to consider multiple channels of communication to find the 40% who aren’t going to libraries. I certainly still go to them, including the Library of Congress, below:

Putting a dollar value on clean water, stable markets, the quality of schooling or access to the judiciary is no easy task. Each of these elements of society, however, are to some extent related to and enabled by open government.

If we think about how the fundamental democratic principles established centuries ago extend today purely in terms of the abstraction of transparency, the “business value” of open government isn’t always immediately clear, at least with respect to investment or outcomes.

Transparency and accountability are core to how we think about government of, by and for the people, where a polity elects representative government. When budgets are constrained, however, city managers, mayors, controllers and chief information officers question the value of every single spending decision. (Or at least they should.)

It’s that context, of course, that’s driving good, hard questions about the business case for open government. Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, said in 2011, at the launch of the Open Government Partnership in New York City, said that increased transparency into a state’s finances and services directly relates to the willingness of the businesses and other nations to invest in a country.

That’s the kind of thinking that has driven the World Bank to open up its data, to give people access to more information about where spending is happening and what those funds are spent upon. While transparency into government budgets varies immensely around the world, from frequently updated portals to paper records filed in local county offices, technology has given states new opportunities to be more accountable — or to be held accountable, by civic media and the emerging practice of data journalism.

The challenges with releasing spending data, however, are manifold, from quality assurance to the (limited) costs of publishing to access to making it comprehensible to taxpayers through visualizations and calculators.

People in and outside of government are working to mitigate these issues, from using better visualization tools to adopting Web-based online platforms for publishing. The process of cleaning and preparing data to be published itself has returns for people inside of government who need access to it. According to the McKinsey Global Institute, on average, government workers spend 19% of their days simply looking for information.

In other words, opening information government to citizens also can mean it’s more available to government itself.

Organizing and establishing governance practices for data, even if some of it will never be published online, also has significant returns. Chicago chief data officer Brett Goldstein established probability curves for violent crime, explained John Tolva, the chief technology officer of the city of Chicago, when we talked in 2011. Since then, “we’re trying to do that elsewhere, uncovering cost savings, intervention points, and efficiencies,” he said.

“We have multiple phases for how we roll out data internally, starting with working with the business owner,” said Goldstein, in an interview. “We figure out how we’ll get it out of the transactional database. After that, we determine if it’s clean, if it’s verified, and if we can sign off on it technically.”

Tolva makes the business case for open data by identifying four areas that support investment, including an economic rationale.

Trust

Accountability of the work force

Business building

Urban analytics

After New York City moved to consolidate and clean its regulatory data, city officials were able to apply predictive data analytics to save lives and money. According to Mike Flowers, the chief analytics officer of NYC, the city achieved:

An increase in the rate of detection for dangerous buildings that are highly likely to result in firefighter injury or death

The discovery of more than twice as many stores selling bootlegged cigarettes

A five-fold increase in the detection of business licenses being flipped

California’s recent budget woes coincided with unprecedented demand for government to be more and efficient online. The state connected citizens to e-services with social media. Both California Unemployment Office and the Department of Motor Vehicles were able to deliver better services online without additional cost.

“You can tweet @CA_EDD and get answers like how long until you get a check, where to go on the website or job fairs,” said Carolyn Lawson, the former deputy director for the technology services governance division in the eServices Office of California, in an interview. “I don’t think the creators of Twitter thought it would be a helpdesk for EDD.”

These kinds of efforts are far from the only places where there are clear returns for investments. A world away from big cities and states in the United States and urban data analytics, the World Bank found the ROI in open government through civic participation and mobile phones. Mobile participatory budgeting helped raise tax revenues in Congo, combining technology, civic participation and systems thinking to give citizens a voice in government.

“Beyond creating a more inclusive environment, the beauty of the project in South Kivu is that citizen participation translates into demonstrated and measurable results on mobilizing more public funds for services for the poor,” said Boris Weber, team leader for ICT4Gov at the World Bank Institute for Open Government, in an interview in Washington. “This makes a strong case when we ask ourselves where the return of investment of open government approaches is.”

Social media was a bigger part of the election season of 2012 than ever before, from the enormous volume of Facebook updates and tweets to memes during the Presidential debates to public awareness of what the campaigns were doing there in popular culture. Facebook may even have booted President Obama’s vote tally.

While it’s too early to say if any of the plethora of platforms played any sort of determinative role in 2012, strong interest in what social media meant in this election season led me to participate in two panels in the past two weeks: one during DC Week 2012 and another at the National Press Club, earlier today. Storifies of the online conversations during each one are embedded below.

As is the case in every major event in the U.S., social media was part of the fabric of communications during Hurricane Sandy. Twitter was a window into what was happening in real-time. Facebook gave families and friends a way to stay in touch about safety or power. And government officials and employees, from first responders mayors to governors to the President of the United States, put critical information into the hands of citizens that needed it.

While Hurricane Sandy cemented the utility of these networks, neither they nor their role are new. With all due respect to Gartner analyst Andrea Di Maio, his notion that people aren’t conveying “useful information” every day there — that it’s just ” chatting about sport results, or favorite actors, or how to bake” — is like some weird flashback to a 2007 blog post or ignorant cable news anchor.

Public sector, first responders and emergency management officials have recognized the utility of social media reports as a means for situational awareness before, during and after natural or man-made disasters for years now and have integrated tools into crisis response.

Officials at local, state and federal levels have confirmed to me again and again that it’s critical to build trusted networks *before* disaster strikes so that when crises occur, the quality of intelligence is improved and existing relationships with influence can amplify their messages.

Media and civil society serve as infomediaries and critical filters (aka, B.S. detectors) for vetting information, something that has proved crucial with fake reports and pictures popping up. Official government accounts play a critical role for putting trusted information into the networks to share, something we saw in real-time up and down the East Coast this week.

To be frank, Di Maio’s advice that authorities shouldn’t incorporate social media into their normal course of business is precisely the opposite of the experience on the ground of organizations like the Los Angeles Fire Department, Red Cross or FEMA. Here’s Brian Humphrey, public information officer of the LAFD, on best practices for social media:

If public safety officials come across Di Maio’s advice, I hope they’ll choose instead to listen to citizens every day and look to scale the best practices of their peers for using technology for emergency response, not start during a crisis.

In general, connecting more citizens with their legislators and create more resources for Congress to understand where their constituents and tech community stands on proposed legislation is a good thing. Last year’s Congressional hearings on the Stop Online Piracy Act and the PROTECT IP Act made it pretty darn clear that many technologists felt that it was no longer ok to not know how the Internet works. Conversely, however, if the tech world cares about what happens in DC, it’s no longer ok to not know how Congress works.

In that context, the launch of a policy platform by one of the biggest tech blogs on the planet could definitely be a positive development. TechCrunch contributor Greg Ferenstein writes that the effort is aimed at “helping policymakers become better listeners, and technologists to be more effective citizens.”

Will “grading” Members of the House of Representatives on TechCrunch’s new Congressional leaderboard lead to them being better listeners? Color me, well, unconvinced. Will an “F” from TechCrunch result in Reps. Smith, Grassley, or Blackburn changing the bills they introduce, support or vote for or against?

Hard to know. True, it’s the sort of symbol that a political opponent could use in an election — but if Reddit’s community couldn’t defeat SOPA’s chief sponsor in a primary, will a bad grade do it? Ferenstein says the leaderboard provides a “a quantified opinion” of the alignment of Reps with the consensus of the tech industry.

Update: as reported by Adrian Jeffries at The Verge, this quantified opinion is based upon TechCrunch editorial and “data and guidance from four tech lobbies.”

Engine Advocacy, which represents startups; TechNet, which represents CEOs in areas from finance and ecommerce to biotech and clean tech; the Silicon Valley Leadership Group, which represents major Silicon Valley employers; and the powerhouse conglomerate The Internet Association, which represents Amazon, Google, and Facebook, among others.

Ferenstein told Hamish McKenzie at PandoDaily that “We’re saying this is generally the view of many people who read our site.” If that’s the case, it would be useful to transparently see the data that shows how TechCrunch readers feel about proposed or passed bills — much in the same way that POPVOX or OpenCongress allow users to express support or opposition to legislation. At the moment, readers are stuck taking their word for it.

McKenzie also highlighted some problems with the rankings and the proposition of rankings themselves:

On three major issues – net neutrality, privacy, and cyber security – TechCrunch’s surveys found no consensus, which somewhat undermines the leaderboard rankings. After all, those rankings appear to be based mainly on three data points: a Congressperson’s position on SOPA, and his or her votes on the Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act and the Fairness for High-Skilled Immigrants Act. It might be true that CrunchGov takes a data-driven approach to its rankings, but when three data points out a possible set of six are omitted, it’s fair to question just how useful the measure is.

As much as anything else, that speaks to the complicated definition of “those in the technology industry.” The industry is so broad and varied, from solo developers creating social games in their basements to hardware executives wanting to drive profits on their devices, that trying to establish consensus on political issues across a broad section of a relatively amorphous community is probably an impossible task. It also overemphasizes tech issues among the myriad of policy concerns that people working in the industry hold, some of which might seem tangential but are actually inextricably tied to the industry. What of climate change? What of taxes? What of puppies?

Also, applying grades to legislators puts TechCrunch in the same camp as the NRA, Americans For Tax Reform, and the Sierra Club in terms of assessing representatives based on narrow, and politically loaded, interests. It’s a headline-oriented approach that provides low-information people with a low-information look at a process and system that is actually very complicated.

More effective citizenship through the Internet?

I’m not unconvinced these limited bill summaries or leaderboard will help “technologists” become “more effective citizens,” though I plan to keep an open mind: this new policy platform is in beta, from the copy to the design to the number of bills in the legislative database or the data around them.

Helping readers to be “more effective” citizens is a bigger challenge than educating them just about how legislators are graded on tech-related bills. The scope of that knowing who your Representative, Senators or where they stand on issues, what bills are up for a vote or introduced, how they voted, The new Congress.gov will connect you to many of the above needs, at the federal level. It might mean following the money, communicating your support or opposition to your elected officials, registering to vote, and participating the democratic processes of state and local government, from schools to . Oh, and voting: tens of millions of American citizens will head to the polls in under two weeks.

To be fair, CrunchGov does do some of these things, linking out to existing open government ecosystem online. Clicking “more info” shows positions Representatives have taken on the tech issues CrunchGov editors have determined that the industry has a “consensus” around, including votes, and links to their profiles in OpenCongress and Influence Explorer. Bill summaries link to maplight.org.

When it comes to the initial set of issues in the legislative database, there’s an overly heavy editorial thumb on the till of what’s deemed important to the tech community.

For one, “cybersecurity” is a poor choice for a Silicon Valley blog. It’s a Washington word, used often in the context of national defense and wars, accompanied by fears of a “cyber Pearl Harbor.” Network security, mobile device security or Web application security are all more specific issues, and ones that startups and huge enterprises all have to deal with in their operations. The security experts I trust see Capitol Hill rhetoric taking aim at the wrong cybersecurity threats.

CrunchGov has only one bill selection for the issue — the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) (H.R. 3523). The summary explains that CISPA proposes more information sharing, has a pie chart showing that “tech-friendly legislators” are split 50/50 on it, shows endorsements and opposition, links to 3 articles about the bill, including TechCrunch’s own coverage.

There’s also framing choices that meant a number of bills aren’t listed — and that the Senate is left out entirely. Why? According to Ferenstein, “the “do-nothing” congress made it impossible to rank the Senate, because they didn’t pass enough bills related to technology policy.”

Congressional leaderboard and limited legislative dashboard aside, CrunchGov is trying to crowdsource legislation using a local installation of MADISON, the software Congressman Issa’s office developed and rolled out last December during the first Congressional hackathon. MADISON was subsequently open sourced, which made the code available to TechCrunch.

It’s in this context that CrunchGov’s aspirations for technology to “democratize democracy itself” may be the most tested. The first test case will be a bill from Congressman Issa to reform government IT procurement. For this experiment to matter, the blog’s readership will need to participate, do so meaningfully, and see that their edits are given weight by bill authors in Washington. Rep. Issa’s office, which has distinguished itself in its use of the Internet to engage the public, may well do so. If proposals from the initial pilot aren’t put into bills, that may be the end of reader interest.

Will other Congressmen and staffers do the same, should their bills be posted? It’s hard to say. As with so many efforts to engage citizens online, this effort is in beta.

This post has been updated, including links to coverage from Pando Daily and the Verge.

I’ve embedded a storify of our conversation below, along with a video explaining more about what they do. Of special note: VIP is partnering with Mobile Commons to let registered voters know where to vote. Just txt “where” or “donde” to 877-877.

As significant as the revisions to San Francisco’s open data policy may prove to be, city officials and civic startups alike emphasize that it’s people are fundamental to sustained improvements in governance and city life.

“Open data would not exist without our community,” said Jay Nath, the city’s first chief innovation officer, this Monday at the Hatchery.

San Francisco’s approach to open innovation in the public sector — what businesses might describe as crowdsourcing, you might think of as citizensourcing for cities — involves a digital mix of hackathons, public engagement and a renewed focus on the city’s dynamic tech community, including the San Francisco Citizens Initiative for Technology and Innovation, or SF.citi.

Cities have been asking their residents how government could work better for some time, of course — and residents have been telling city governments how they could work better for much longer than that. New technologies, however, have created new horizons for participatory platforms to engage citizens, including mobile apps and social media.

Open data and civic coders also represent a “new class of civic engagement focused on solving issues, not just sharing problems,” argues Nath. “We have dozens and dozens of apps in San Francisco. I think it’s such a rich community. We haven’t awarded prizes. It’s really about sustainability and creating community. We’ve six or seven events and more than 10,000 hours of civic engagement.”

San Francisco’s dedicated citizensourcing platform is called “ImproveSF.” The initiative had its genesis as an internal effort to allow employees to make government better, said Walton. The ideas that come out of both, he said, are typically about budget savings.

The explosion of social media in the past few years has created new challenges for San Francisco to take public comments digitally on Facebook or Twitter that officials haven’t fully surmounted yet.

“We don’t try to answer and have end-to-end dialog,” said Jon Walton, San Francisco’s CIO, in an interview earlier this year. Part of that choice is driven by the city’s staffing constraints.

“What’s important is that we store, archive and make comments available to policy makers so that they can see what the public input is,” he said.

Many priorities are generated by citizen ideas submitted digitally, emphasized Walton, which then can be put on a ballot that residents then vote on and become policy by public mandate.

“How do you get a more robust conversation going on with the public?” asked Walton. “In local government, what we’re trying to do is form better decisions on where we spend time and money. That means learning about other ideas and facilitating conversations.”

He pointed to the deployment of free public Wi-Fi this year as an example of how online public comments can help shape city decisions. “We had limited funds for the project,” he said. “Just $80,000. What can you do with that?”

Walton said they’re working with the mayor’s office to make the next generation of ImproveSF more public-facing.

“How do we take the same idea and expose it to the public?” he asked. “Any new ‘town hall’ should really involve the public in asking what the business of government should be? Where should sacrifices and investments be made? There’s so much energy around the annual ballot process. People haven’t really talked about expanding that. The thing that we’re focusing on is to make decision-making more interactive.”

At least some of San Francisco’s focus has gone into mobile development.

“If you look at the new social media app, we’re answering the question of ‘how do we make public meetings available to people on handhelds and tablets’?” said Walton.

“The next generation will focus on how do they not just watch a meeting but see it live, text in questions and have a dialog with policy makers about priorities, live, instead of coming in in person.”

Last week, the Library of Congress launched Congress.gov in beta, its vision of the next generation of THOMAS, the online repository of the nation’s legislative data. The site features a “most viewed bills” list that lets visitors to the site see at a glance what laws or proposals are gathering interest the site.

That the top bill is the Stop Online Piracy Act — and that the PROTECT IP Act is also in the top 5 — is unlikely to be a surprise to observers. The other bills at the top of the list — HR3035 Mobile Informational Call Act, HR2306 Ending Federal Marijuana Prohibition Act and S3240 Agriculture Reform, Food, and Jobs Act – may be more unfamiliar to many people. The complete list is in the infographic below, including whether POPVOX’s userbase supported or opposed them.

Marci Harris, the co-founder and CEO of POPVOX, wrote in via email to note that, as the 112th Congress comes to a close, the sequestration issue is starting to pop.

**DISCLAIMER: Tim O’Reilly, my publisher, provided angel funding for POPVOX last year. He calls it “a kind of Google Analytics service for politics, bringing visibility and actionable insight to both Congressional staffers and advocacy organizations.”

While campaigns have a public presence that is mostly recorded and observed, the stuff that goes on behind the scenes is so much more sophisticated than it has been. In 2008 we were fascinated by the Obama campaign’s use of iPhones for data collection; now we’re entering an age where campaigns don’t just collect information by hand, but harvest it and learn from it. An “information arms race,” as GOP consultant Alex Gage puts it.

For most news organizations, the standard approach to campaign coverage is tantamount to bringing a knife to a gun fight. How many data scientists work for news organizations? We are falling behind, and we risk not being able to explain to our readers and users how their representatives get elected or defeated.

Writing for the New York Times today, Slate columnist Sasha Issenberg revisited that theme, arguing that campaign reporters are behind the curve in understanding, analyzing or being able to capably replicate what political campaigns are now doing with data. Whether you’re new to the reality of the role of big data in this campaign or fascinated by it, a recent online conference on the data-driven politics of 2012 will be of interest. I’ve embedded it below:

Issenberg’s post has stirred online debate amongst journalists, academics and at least one open government technologist. I’ve embedded a storify of them below.

That experiment is about to be writ much larger. In a release today, first reported (as far as I can tell) by Mike Allen in Politico Playbook, CNN and Facebook announced that they will be partnering on a “I’m Voting” Facebook app that will display commitments to vote on timelines, newsfeeds and the “real-time ticker” in Facebook.

“Each campaign cycle brings new technologies that enhance the way that important connections between citizens and their elected representatives are made. Though the mediums have changed, the critical linkages between candidates and voters­ remain,” said Joel Kaplan, Facebook Vice President-U.S. Public Policy, in a prepared statement. “Innovations like Facebook can help transform this informational experience into a social one for the American people.”

“By allowing citizens to connect in an authentic and meaningful way with presidential candidates and discuss critical issues facing the country, we hope more voters than ever will get involved with issues that matter most to them,” said Joe Lockhart, Facebook Vice President Corporate Communications, in a prepared statement. “Facebook is pleased to partner with CNN on this uniquely participatory experience.”

“We fundamentally changed the way people consume live event coverage, setting a record for the most-watched live video event in Internet history, when we teamed up with Facebook for the 2009 Inauguration of President Obama,” said KC Estenson, SVP CNN Digital, in a prepared statement. “By again harnessing the power of the Facebook platform and coupling it with the best of our journalism, we will redefine how people engage in the democratic process and advance the way a news organization covers a national election.”

“This partnership doubles down on CNN’s mission to provide the most engaging coverage of the 2012 election season,” said Sam Feist, CNN Washington bureau chief, in a prepared statement. “CNN’s unparalleled political reporting combined with Facebook’s social connectivity will empower more American voters in this critical election season.”

What will ‘social citizenship’ mean?

There’s also a larger question about the effect of these technologies on society: Will social networks encouraging people to share their voting behavior lead to more engagement throughout the year? After all, people are citizens 365 days a year, not just every two years on election day. Will “social citizenship” play a role in Election 2012?

In 2010, Foursquare founder Dennis Crowley said yes. As has often been the case (Dodgeball, anyone?), Crowley may well have been ahead of his time.

“One of the things that we’re finding is that when people send their Foursquare checkins out to Twitter and to Facebook, it can drive behaviors,” said Crowley in 2010. “If I check into a coffee shop all the time, my friends are going to be like, hey, I want to go to that coffee shop. We’re thinking the same thing could happen en masse if you start checking into these polling stations, if you start broadcasting that you voted, it may encourage other friends to go out there and do something.”

The early evidence, at least from healthcare in 2010, was that social sharing can lead to more awareness and promote health. Whether civic health improves, at least as measured in voter participation, is another matter. How you voted used to be a question that each registered citizen could choose to keep to him or herself. In 2012 and the age of social media, that social norm may be shifting.

One clear winner in Election 2012, however, will almost certainly be Facebook, which will be collecting a lot of data about users that participate in this app and associated surveys — and that data will be of great interest to political scientists and future campaigns alike.

“Since both CNN and [Facebook] are commercial entities, and since data collection/tracking practices in these apps are increasingly invasive, I am curious to see how these developments impact the evolution of the currently outdated US privacy regime,” commented Vivian Tero, an IDC analyst focused on governance, risk and compliance.

UPDATE: The Poynter Institute picked up this story and connected it in a tweet with a recent AdWeek interview with CNN digital senior vice president and general manager KC Estenson on “CNN’s digital power play.

Estenson, whose network has been suffering from lower ratings of late, notes that online, CNN is now “regularly getting 60 million unique users,” with an “average 20 million minutes a month across the platforms” and CNN Digital generating 110 million video streams per month.

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About

Alexander B. Howard is a DC-based a technology writer and editor. Previously, he was the Washington Correspondent at O'Reilly Media, where he covered the voices, technologies and issues that matter in the intersection of government, technology and society.